Social savings communities have been around nearly as long as communities themselves. Historically, communities would come together and pool resources that could be shared among the others at necessary times to provide assistance to one another and foster stability. Traditionally, such resources were often food, tools, and other physical commodities. In time, social savings communities that worked together for saving money began to form. In a social savings community, multiple members come together to pool their money. At predetermined intervals of time, a member will be paid out a larger sum from the pool, and the pooling then payout process will continue until it has cycled through every member. This enables groups of individuals to work together to save money that they may have spent otherwise, and receive the payout in a random or predetermined/agreed order for fairness and to remove expectations on the part of the receiving individuals, which may further assist in savings.
Traditionally, such groups were facilitated through the gathering of physical currency. For instance, each person in the group may throw their cash into a jar, with one person, sometimes a third party not in the group (e.g., a bank, trusted friend, etc.), being entrusted to keep the jar and its contents safe until the payout is made. However, in more modern times where a vast amount of banking is done electronically, there are no easy analogues. If group members wanted to pool their money electronically, they would have to select a single account to gather the money into, where control of and access to the account may be contentious. In addition, it is often more difficult to transfer currency from one account to another if the other account is out of the first individual's control, and more so if the account is issued by a different issuing institution. Furthermore, it requires additional trust, as the account may not be easily monitored and controlled, unlike a physical jar where each individual could easily see the contents inside and, if need be, intervention (e.g., taking back the jar) performed.
Thus, there is a need for a modern technological solution to enable a social savings community to be formed that is not limited by financial institution and has complete transparency and auditability, as well as being secure and scalable so that thousands or tens of thousands of such savings groups can be supported and served substantially simultaneously in an real world environment in a way the prior ways cannot, thus representing a technological advance over these prior systems.